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Thursday, August 11, 2011
Shakespeare and Country Music
There's a tie between them? Indeed!
From a piece in the Los Angeles Times...
Why haven’t Shakespeare and country music come together more often?
“Country music deals so unabashedly with big feelings — just like tragedy,” Chalsma said. “I thought the audience would connect to the song.”
Country music has long been a place where songwriters explore romantic tragedy using language as compact and colorful as the Bard of Avon’s. Clever couplets, vivid imagery and unexpected turns of phrase are the stock in trade of both.
In modern times, Shakespeare’s work is often placed among the pinnacles of high art in the Western world; just the opposite of country music, which is strongly rooted in the lives and concerns of regular folk. But the two are, historically speaking, closely connected.
“It’s always ironic to me when people start talking about Shakespeare as being so highfalutin’,” said Thomas Bradac, founder of Shakespeare Orange County and a theater professor at Chapman University in Orange. “The poetry was always considered high art, and the sonnets, but the plays themselves were the dime novels of their day. That’s why the royalty didn’t go to them, and why they got kicked out of London and moved to the South Bank, next to the whorehouses.”
Some directors have set productions of “Taming of the Shrew” in the Old West to help audiences connect better with Shakespeare’s treatise on gender stereotypes, while the Bard’s best-known themes and characters have occasionally surfaced as country song fodder.
Taylor Swift’s hit “Love Story” may be the most recent example, one in which the young singer-songwriter cast herself and her would-be love as Shakespeare’s star-crossed couple. Except she added a happy ending.
Calligraphers Still Going Against Type
The Los Angeles Times profiles calligraphers and discusses their art.
From the piece...
"Calligraphy is an art; typing isn't," she says. "When you see letters that have been handwritten, you make a connection that doesn't occur with type. Hand lettering leads to a broader, richer relationship to language."
But in a world bent upon frugality and speed, calligraphy is becoming a marginalized skill, more hobby than profession.
Lettering styles that look hand-drawn can be downloaded off the Internet. Budget constraints have led the city and county of Los Angeles to employ fewer artists skilled in calligraphy — targeted as an unnecessary taxpayer expense — and computers now produce portions of proclamations.
The calligraphy class that Singh taught for 25 years at the Beverly Hills Adult School was recently eliminated for lack of funding, and in April the Indiana Department of Education issued a memo emphasizing "keyboarding skills" over cursive writing for third-graders. Many calligraphers credit early writing lessons for inspiring their interest in letters.
The erosion of their trade has left some calligraphers eager to take hammers to word processors.
The Whitman of the Industrial Heartland
Congratulations, Phillip Levine, on being the US Poet Laureate.
An Abandoned Factory, Detroit
The gates are chained, the barbed-wire fencing stands,
An iron authority against the snow,
And this grey monument to common sense
Resists the weather. Fears of idle hands,
Of protest, men in league, and of the slow
Corrosion of their minds, still charge this fence.
Beyond, through broken windows one can see
Where the great presses paused between their strokes
And thus remain, in air suspended, caught
In the sure margin of eternity.
The cast-iron wheels have stopped; one counts the spokes
Which movement blurred, the struts inertia fought,
And estimates the loss of human power,
Experienced and slow, the loss of years,
The gradual decay of dignity.
Men lived within these foundries, hour by hour;
Nothing they forged outlived the rusted gears
Which might have served to grind their eulogy.
Wednesday, August 10, 2011
8-Bit Twilight
Will Bella end up with Edward or Jacob? Find out in Twilight: Eclipse in this 8-Bit Interactive!
Big Plans for Laura Ingalls Wilder Home
Indeed!
From an article in the News-Leader...
Wilder moved to the Ozarks in 1894, which is where she eventually penned her famous "Little House" books.
The Laura Ingalls Wilder Home Association owns five of her original manuscripts, and board members hope to preserve them and the history of this farm through an upcoming renovation and restoration project.
The association has received a $200,000 grant from the USDA to build an archival library. It needs to raise additional funds, and Coday said former first lady Laura Bush has agreed to be an "honorary chairman" of the campaign.
"She said she loved the books since she was a little girl. She was a school librarian, and that makes her very interested in us doing the right thing with all these treasures," Coday said. "She said she couldn't promise anything other than her support as honorary chairman. We won't ask her to do more than she can."
The library will house the original manuscripts, first editions of her books, letters and some of the items currently in the museum, which they would eventually like to tear down.
Revisiting Ken Kesey's Drugged Out "Magic Trip"
The Atlantic chats with the filmmakers of a new documentary on Ken Kesey and his merry pranksters.
From the piece...
What can we stand to learn from Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters? What makes them relevant today?
AG: This is a tough question. In some ways, Kesey and the Pranksters are hard to remove from their time. The year the bus trip was taken — 1964 — was a year with one foot in the ’50s and one foot in the ’60s to come. Kesey himself felt that the trip might be a kind of agent provocateur for those along the side of the road who were consumed by fear (the shadow of the bomb, the McCarthy era and the recent assassination of John F. Kennedy). He believed in magic and in a definitively American yearning for freedom. That's part of what the bus trip was about: a siren's song to those strapped to the mast to come out and play. Of course, in Greek mythology, the sweet sound of the sirens caused many ships to run aground on the rocks. So too, the freedoms of the ’60s can seem a kind of lunacy today. Indeed, they ran aground at Altamont as early as 1969.
But as easy as it is to dismiss the bus trip (and when you look at the loony antics on film it's even easier) there is also something to admire. Kesey was an explorer — with writing, performance art and hallucinogens. In retrospect, explorers can look silly as we can see, with the benefit of maps written later, all their false starts, wrong turns and bumbling into dead ends. But they also help to blaze trails. The ’50s and the early ’60s (look at Mad Men) were a pretty rigid time. The country was rich but the weight of conformity was heavy. It's hard to even imagine how structured that world was. Today, we are the beneficiaries of cultural freedoms and expanded thinking … that wouldn't be possible without the explorers. (Even Lee Atwater ended up playing the electric guitar!)
A Publishing Revival?
We're often told that the book publishing industry is going the way of the dodo. Not so!
From an article in the New York Times...
BookStats, a comprehensive survey conducted by two major trade groups that was released early Tuesday, revealed that in 2010 publishers generated net revenue of $27.9 billion, a 5.6 percent increase over 2008. Publishers sold 2.57 billion books in all formats in 2010, a 4.1 percent increase since 2008.
The Association of American Publishers and the Book Industry Study Group collaborated on the report and collected data from 1,963 publishers, including the six largest trade publishers. The survey encompassed five major categories of books: trade, K-12 school, higher education, professional and scholarly.
“We’re seeing a resurgence, and we’re seeing it across all markets — trade, academic, professional,” said Tina Jordan, the vice president of the Association of American Publishers. “In each category we’re seeing growth. The printed word is alive and well whether it takes a paper delivery or digital delivery.”
Tuesday, August 09, 2011
15 Weird and Mysterious Books
The list, care of Business Pundit.
From the piece (and pictured above)...
The Book of Soyga
John Dee was a famed Elizabethan scholar, mathematician, astrologer, occultist, and alchemist. He was a consultant to the court of Queen Elizabeth, and — even more impressively at the time — owned the largest library in England, some 3000 volumes.
Dee believed the Book of Soyga, also called Aldaraia by the magician, to have been revealed to Adam in the garden of Eden by God’s angels. The book itself was a 16th century treatise on magic, and about as likely to be celestially derived as this article is (Hint: it’s not). The mystery of this book actually starts after Dee’s death. Dee’s fantastic library had been ransacked during his several years spent on the European continent, and he was forced to sell much of the remaining volumes to support himself at the end of his life. The Book Of Soyga was presumed to be lost until 1994, when the scholar Deborah Harkness discovered two copies, in embarrassingly obvious places: the British Library in London, the Bodleian Library in Oxford.
The Future of the Book
Imprint has a Q&A with the Institute for the Future of the Book. They're about worried about it - the future.
From the piece...
The first time we spoke was back in the pre-Kindle, pre-iPad days of 2006. For decades, you’ve actively been thinking about and working to augment the future of the book. What is your read of how the concept of the book has changed in the past five years?
There is the question of how it has involved in my mind and how it has evolved in the minds of the public. I view the book as a place where readers congregate and the social aspect of reading is where we’re going. The publishing industry is trying very hard to keep the traditional model of a book in tact, selling 300 or 400 pages to one reader at a time.
There is this social aspect: books are becoming these places to congregate, the form of expression is undergoing changes. In most cases e-readers and the e-book developers haven’t caught up to this. There are concepts that are too far afield, like people trying to write a novel collaboratively in World of Warcraft. I have no problem with such a book being considered fiction just like Tolkien but the execution isn’t there. And then there is something like Push Pop Press. Yes, the Al Gore book has interactive media but it is just for one reader at a time. They are simply books with audio and video on the page. We figured that out long, long ago. And it isn’t sustainable. When you’re doing something for the first time you can beg, borrow and steal all sorts of help when it comes to all this content. But when you go back to do it again and again you have to pay up.
My big problem with these apps is that they are like CD-ROMs, in the wrong sense – both are islands unto themselves. I’m reading The Waste Land all by myself. The apps are all walled in, all you have is the app. Heaven forbid you have an idea and want to go down the rabbit hole. You can, but you have to leave the app. I believe we are heading toward browser-based materials.
Edward Thomas, Robert Frost, and the Road to War
There's an interesting story in the Guardian about friendship, a famous poem that then separated them, and WWI.
From the piece...
Noble, charismatic, wise: in the years since its composition, "The Road Not Taken" has been understood by some as an emblem of individual choice and self-reliance, a moral tale in which the traveller takes responsibility for – and so effects – his own destiny. But it was never intended to be read in this way by Frost, who was well aware of the playful ironies contained within it, and would warn audiences: "You have to be careful of that one; it's a tricky poem – very tricky."
Frost knew that reading the poem as a straight morality tale ought to pose a number of difficulties. For one: how can we evaluate the outcome of the road not taken? For another: had the poet chosen the road more travelled by then that, logically, could also have made all the difference. And in case the subtlety was missed, Frost set traps in the poem intended to explode a more earnest reading. The two paths, he wrote, had been worn "really about the same", and "equally lay / In leaves no step had trodden black", showing the reader that neither road was more or less travelled, and that choices may in some sense be equal.
But the poem carried a more personal message. Many were the walks when Thomas would guide Frost on the promise of rare wild flowers or birds' eggs, only to end in self-reproach when the path he chose revealed no such wonders. Amused at Thomas's inability to satisfy himself, Frost chided him, "No matter which road you take, you'll always sigh, and wish you'd taken another."
To Thomas, it was not the least bit funny. It pricked at his confidence, at his sense of his own fraudulence, reminding him he was neither a true writer nor a true naturalist, cowardly in his lack of direction. And now the one man who understood his indecisiveness the most astutely – in particular, towards the war – appeared to be mocking him for it.
Thomas responded angrily. He did not subscribe to models of self-determination, or the belief that the spirit could triumph over adversity; some things seemed to him ingrained, inevitable. How free-spirited his friend seemed in comparison. This American who sailed for England on a long-shot, knowing no one and without a place to go, rode his literary fortunes and won his prize, then set sail again to make himself a new home. None of this was Thomas. "It isn't in me," he pleaded.
Monday, August 08, 2011
Poe Museum Nevermore?
The Edgar Allan Poe House in Baltimore is facing steep financial difficulties, again.
From a piece in the New York Times...
For a second year city leaders have chosen not to subsidize a museum in the tiny house where the impoverished Poe lived from around 1833 to 1835, a decision that means it may have to close soon.
Since the city cut off its $85,000 in annual support last year, the house has been operating on reserve funds, which are expected to run out as early as next summer. In the coming months consultants hired by the city will try to come up with a business plan to make the Edgar Allan Poe House financially self-sufficient, possibly by updating its exhibits to draw more visitors.
But the museum sits amid a housing project, far off this city’s tourist beaten path, and attracts only 5,000 visitors a year.
“It would be ironic, after all these years of aggressively and actively promoting the Poe House and the Poe grave, to have it close,” said Jeff Jerome, the house’s curator for more than 30 years.
The (Undead) State of Zombie Literature
The New York Times takes a look at the rise, and rise, of zombie literature.
From the article...
The thing about these newly empowered 21st-century zombies is that they keep coming at you, relentlessly, wave upon wave of necrotic, mindlessly voracious semi-beings. According to the current convention, the individual reanimatee can be dispatched by shooting or stabbing it in the brain, but the strength of this inexorably advancing zombie population is in its numbers: the ambulatory dead are, you might say, a fast-growing demographic. This sort of creature is an extremely convenient monster for low-budget filmmakers like Romero, who had the wit to realize that with zombies he wouldn’t have to break the bank on highly skilled professional actors. Anybody can shamble along looking vacant.
In fiction, however, these alarming entities have fewer obvious attractions because, unlike vampires, werewolves, demons, witches, goblins and shape-shifters, zombies can’t plausibly be endowed with rich, complex inner lives. They don’t even have personalities. Christopher Golden, in the preface to his anthology of zombie stories, The New Dead (St. Martin’s Griffin, paper, $14.99), owns up to a degree of puzzlement about the current popularity of these creatures. “I have never had any trouble understanding the fascination with vampires,” he writes. “But zombies? Not so much.” Undeterred, Golden has put together a hefty collection of zombiana to take its place on the sagging shelf next to John Joseph Adams’s anthologies The Living Dead and The Living Dead 2 (Night Shade, paper, $15.95 and $15.99); Max Brooks’s World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (Three Rivers, paper, $14.95); the freak best seller Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, “by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith” (Quirk, paper, $12.95); and The Walking Dead: Compendium One (Image Comics, paper, $59.99), which compiles the first 48 issues of the comic, written by Robert Kirkman, that was turned into a popular cable series last fall.
Albert Camus Killed by the KGB?
Perhaps.
From an article in the Guardian...
Camus was killed instantly when Gallimard's powerful Facel Vega car left the icy road and ploughed into a tree. Gallimard died a few days later. As well as the train ticket, police found 144 pages of handwritten manuscript in the wreckage entitled The First Man, an unfinished novel based on Camus's childhood in Algeria and which he had predicted would be his finest work. The tragedy shocked and saddened France. But no one imagined that the crash had been anything other than an accident.
The Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera has now suggested that Soviet spies might have been behind the crash. The theory is based on remarks by Giovanni Catelli, an Italian academic and poet, who noted that a passage in a diary written by the celebrated Czech poet and translator Jan Zábrana, and published as a book entitled Celý život, was missing from the Italian translation.
In the missing paragraph, Zábrana writes: "I heard something very strange from the mouth of a man who knew lots of things and had very informed sources. According to him, the accident that had cost Albert Camus his life in 1960 was organised by Soviet spies. They damaged a tyre on the car using a sophisticated piece of equipment that cut or made a hole in the wheel at speed.
Sunday, August 07, 2011
The True Price of Publishing
Ebooks have reignited the question of what we're really paying publishers for – the physical product, or what's written inside?
From a piece in the Guardian...
When you shell out £25 or £30 for a hardback, what exactly are you paying for? I have always assumed – like, I imagine, most people – that the high cost of hardbacks is down to the fact that they are much more expensive than paperbacks to produce. But in fact this isn't the case at all. They are more expensive, true, but only slightly more – certainly not nearly enough to account for the £10 or £15 difference that has traditionally existed between the two formats.
In his forthcoming book Free Ride: How Digital Parasites Are Destroying the Culture Business and How the Culture Business Can Fight Back, the American author Robert Levine has an excellent chapter on publishing in which he interrogates the forces driving the pricing of books, in both their paper and digital forms. And some of the explanations he gives are (to me at least) surprising. For example, it turns out that "publishers only spend $3.50 to print and distribute a hardback". (Let's say it's £3 in Britain.) So when, this autumn, you go into your local bookshop and spend £30 on that gorgeous copy of Claire Tomalin's long-awaited Dickens biography, you really are just putting a large amount of profit into the hands of her publisher, with some knocked off for the retailer. Right?
Well, yes and no.
Saturday, August 06, 2011
Fish Hatchery Tour Guide - John Steinbeck
Publishers Weekly revels in authors' day jobs.
From the piece...
1. John Steinbeck was a caretaker and tour guide at a fish hatchery in Lake Tahoe, where he worked on his fist novel and also met his future first wife, Carol Henning. She was a tourist on one of his tours.
2. Douglas Adams first thought of the idea for A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy while moonlighting as a hotel security guard in London.
3. Jeanette Winterson, in addition to driving an ice cream truck, was a make-up artist at a funeral parlor.
4. Dashiell Hammett was hired by the Pinkerton Detective Agency as an “operative” at age 21. His job description included staking out houses and trailing suspects. He was thankful for the work; his previous job had been a nail machine operator.
It's Time for Book Publishers to Play Dirty
So says an employee at Powell's Books for the Chicago Tribune against e-books.
From the piece...
Last month a fellow bibliophile, someone with whom I work at a bookstore in Portland, Ore., described one of Kindle's newest TV commercials. In it, a woman in red struts past her friend who asks where she's going. "I want to get a book that came out today," she says. When he tells her that he does too, she suggests he join her at the bookstore.
"I'm good," he says, then pushes a button on his Kindle. "Got it."
"It made me want to run out and buy one," my co-worker said, "and then want to cry." I know exactly what she meant: Even to a devout bibliophile, the ad is so effective that it arouses conflicting urges to own a Kindle and resist it on principle.
Another issue the commercial raises is one so obvious that I am shocked I haven't heard it before: Why hasn't America's publishing industry launched an ad campaign as seductive and aggressive as the Kindle's? Not to market front-list titles or authors, but to market the paper book form itself? In other words, sell consumers on the exclusive pleasures and qualities traditional books offer that e-books cannot. That's exactly what Kindle's TV commercials have been doing, saying here's what we can do that regular books can't.
Young People Are Reading More Than You
So says McSweeney's in a new essay.
From the site...
A recent survey issued by Scholastic, the 2010 Kids & Family Reading Report, found that 43 percent of the children ages 9-11 believe the most important outcome of reading books for fun is to open up the imagination. 62 percent of the same demographic say they read books for fun “to be inspired by storylines and characters.” For a group whose numbers were clearly dwindling in the 1990s, it is not surprising that the release of an incredibly imaginative story coincided with a dramatic revival or readership.
The clamor for young adult reading programs to “save reading” seems to indicate that kids were reading much more twenty years ago but have recently given it up. This is, of course, not true. In the 1960s, Daniel Fader, a high school teacher and University of Michigan professor, realized none of his students were reading independently and founded the “Hooked on Books.” In the program, he replaced thick anthologies with single copies of novels and used class time for independent reading. In 1985, Richard C. Anderson’s seminal report endorsed by the Commission on Reading, Becoming a Nation of Readers, claimed “Children should spend more time reading.” In 1996 the Standards for the English Language Arts, commissioned by the National Council of Teachers of English and the National Reading Association placed independent reading at the center of their curriculum. Educators have always known reading is important for child development, it has simply been difficult to market literature to this age group. Until Harry Potter.
As Motoko Rich wrote in a 2007 New York Times article “in a way that was previously rare for books, Harry Potter entered the pop-culture consciousness. The movies… heightened the fervor, spawning video games and collectible figurines. That made it easier for kids who thought reading was for geeks to pick up a book.”
Friday, August 05, 2011
The Secret Garden's Hidden Depths
Frances Hodgson Burnett's novel – published 100 years ago this summer – centers on a selfish, mean-spirited heroine, whose journey towards self-knowledge begins with an unlocked door.
From a piece in the Guardian...
The secret garden is a catalyst for healing in the characters who see it, and with Colin the effect is literal. Unable to walk when we meet him, he discovers in the garden that he can stand. He secretly practises until he is able to shock his father by getting out his wheelchair and walking. With Colin, it's apparent from the start that his disability is psychological, rooted in a loveless childhood. But it's not surprising that Burnett's notion of cures is informed by Christian Science. The philosophy is plain in the text: "When new beautiful thoughts began to push out the old hideous ones, life began to come back to [Colin], his blood ran healthily through his veins and strength poured into him like a flood." On the page, Colin's story is haunting. In context of a larger literature that has relatively few complex characters with disabilities, the diagnosis of "it's all in his head" feels disappointing.
The history of the novel's reception is as strange as the text. While The Secret Garden is now catalogued as children's literature, it was originally serialised in a magazine for adults before being published in its entirety in 1911. Marketed to both young and adult readers, it had lukewarm success and became little more than a footnote in Burnett's prolific career; her other novels, such as A Little Princess and Little Lord Fauntleroy, were far more popular at the time of her death in 1924. What probably saved the book from the out-of-print netherworld was the 20th-century rise in children's literature scholarship, and general attentiveness to literature for children as a distinct genre. That, and the fact that the book's copyright expired in the US in 1987, and most other places in 1995, opening the way for untold numbers of abridged, unabridged and adapted editions.
Librarians in the U.S. - 1880 to 2009
How has the profession of librarian evolved over the years? Oxford University Press recently studied census data and came up with all sorts of interesting tidbits.
From the post...
For the first 110 years of data, the number of librarians increased, especially after World War II. In 1990, the trend reversed. Over the past 20 years, the number of librarians has dropped by 31 percent, though the decline has slowed.
Considering the nation today, the states with the largest librarian populations are: Pennsylvania, Illinois, New York, Texas and California. Meanwhile, the states with the highest concentrations of librarians (or librarians per capita) are: Vermont, D.C., Rhode Island, Alabama, New Hampshire.
We Can't Teach Our Kids to Love Reading
So notes the Chronicle for Higher Education.
From an article...
At the beginning of the 20th century, perhaps 2 percent of Americans attended a university; now the number is closer to 70 percent (though only about 30 percent get bachelor's degrees). A particularly sharp acceleration occurred in the years after 1945, when the GI Bill enabled soldiers returning from World War II to attend college for free, thus leading universities across the country to throw up quonset huts for classrooms, and English professors to figure out how to teach 40 students at a time, rather than 11, how to read sonnets. (And those GI's wanted their children to have the same educational opportunities they had, or better ones.) These changes have had enormous social consequences, but for our purposes here, the one that matters is this: From 1945 to 2000, or thereabouts, far more people than ever before in human history were expected to read, understand, appreciate, and even enjoy books.
In 2005, Wendy Griswold, Terry McDonnell, and Nathan Wright, sociologists from Northwestern University, published a paper concluding that while there was a period in which extraordinarily many Americans practiced long-form reading, whether they liked it or not, that period was indeed extraordinary and not sustainable in the long run. "We are now seeing such reading return to its former social base: a self-perpetuating minority that we shall call the reading class."
I don't think of the distinction between readers and nonreaders—better, those who love reading and those who don't so much—in terms of class, which may be a function of my being a teacher of literature rather than a sociologist, but may also be a function of my knowledge that readers can be found at all social stations. But whatever designations we want to use, it has to be admitted that much of the anxiety about American reading habits, and those in other developed nations to a lesser degree, arises from frustration at not being able to sustain a permanent expansion of "the reading class" beyond what may be its natural limits.
Books Without Borders
My hometown weekly, The Stranger, talks about 'the world's dumbest bookstore chain.'
From a piece by Paul Constant...
At the time, independent bookstores were blaming Borders for a spate of mom-and-pop bookstore closures around the country. I'll never forget the employee at Bookland in Maine who coldly accused me of single-handedly destroying her small chain when I admitted who my employer was, even as I was buying $50 worth of books from her. Of course, the accusations had truth to them—small bookstores simply couldn't compete with the deep discounts the chains offered—but for what it's worth, every employee who worked at Borders, at least when I first joined the company, adored literature. We were not automatons out to assassinate local business. We wanted to work with the cultural artifacts that were the most important things in our lives, the things that made us who we were. Not all of us could find work at independent bookstores, so we did the next best thing: We went to work for a company that seemingly cared about quality literature and regional reading tastes, and gave its employees a small-but-fair wage for full-time bookselling careers, with excellent benefits. It sure didn't feel like selling out.
Until suddenly, one day, it did feel like selling out. Because it was. Our displays were bought and paid for by publishers; where we used to present books that we loved and wanted to champion, now mediocre crap was piled on every flat surface. The front of the store, with all the kitchen magnets and board games and junk you don't need took over large chunks of the expansive magazine and local-interest sections. Orders came from the corporate headquarters in Ann Arbor every Sunday to change out the displays. One time I had to take down some of the store's most exciting up-and-coming fiction titles (including a newly published book that was gathering word-of-mouth buzz, thanks to our booksellers, called Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone) to put up a wall of Clash CDs. One month, for some reason, the cafe sold Ernest Hemingway–branded chai.
Thursday, August 04, 2011
The Teacher Who Encouraged Me to Write
Dave Eggers heaps praise on an old English teacher.
From an article on Salon...
I took his course when I was a junior, and the first book we read was "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man." In those first few weeks, he showed us a caricature of James Joyce from the New York Review of Books. In it, Joyce's hands were rendered large, cupped and moving, as if paddling through water. Mr. Criche asked if anyone knew why the artist had depicted Joyce that way, and I raised my hand. "Is he swimming through a stream of consciousness?"
Mr. Criche cocked his head a bit, confirmed the answer, and a wave of validation swept over me. I hadn't known, until that moment, how badly I'd wanted his approval. I was going through some rough times at school and at home -- my face and back were covered in acne, my chest was concave, my last name sounded like food -- but in that class, I felt I had worth. After that, I took it upon myself to impress him. Though William Faulkner wasn't assigned reading, for weeks I brought "As I Lay Dying" to class, stacked neatly upon my other books, hoping he'd notice. (He didn't.)
He was kind to me, but I had no sense that he took particular notice of me. There were other, smarter kids in the class, and soon I fell back into my usual position -- of thinking I was just a little over average in most things. But near the end of the semester, we read "Macbeth." Believe me, this is not an easy play to connect to the lives of suburban high schoolers, but somehow he made the play seem electric, dangerous, relevant. After procrastinating till the night before it was due, I wrote a paper about the play -- the first paper I typed on a typewriter -- and turned it in the next day.
I got a good grade on it, and below the grade Mr. Criche wrote, "Sure hope you become a writer." That was it.
The Lost Art of Postcard Writing
I'm not entirely sure it's an art form, but, alas, sending postcards is going the way of the dodo. NOOOO!!!
From an article in the New York Review of Books...
Unlike letter writing, there never has been, and there never could be, an anthology of the best of postcard writing, because when people collect postcards, it’s usually for reasons other than their literary qualities. If there was such a book, I’m sure it would contain hundreds of anonymous masterpieces of this minimalist art, since unlike letters, cards require a verbal concision that can rise to high level of eloquence: brief and heart-breaking glimpses into someone’s existence, in addition to countless amusing and well-told anecdotes. Now and then one encounters in antique shops and used book stores boxes full of old postcards valued for their antiquity, their images and their stamps. The writing found on them most often tends to be in faded ink and hard to read. To anyone with plenty of time on their hands, I recommend reading a bunch of them. Postcards continued to be used by people of modest means to convey important family news long after telephones ceased to be a novelty. I once came across one that said:
Francis Brown died last night, funeral on Tuesday.
That was all there was. The image on the other side of the card was of a famous race horse from 1920s, so I immediately pictured Mr. Brown with a straw hat, a cane in his gloved hand and carnation in his lapel, stopping for a beer in a saloon before catching the streetcar to go to the track in Boston or San Francisco.
So, dear reader, if you happen, on your daily rounds, to come across in a coffee shop or a restaurant some poor soul sitting alone over a postcard and visibly struggling with what to write, take pity on him or her. They are the last of a species, and are almost certainly middle aged or elderly, already nervous and worried about all the problems older people face in this country.
Spider-Man is Dead
Peter Parker's perished.
From an article in the Guardian about how Marvel is going to re-up Spider-Man...
The conclusion of the Death of Spider-Man story from Marvel's Ultimate Comics will see Peter Parker's alter ego succumb to his nemesis the Green Goblin, dying in the arms of Mary Jane following a valiant battle. "We've never seen a world without Spider-Man, a world without Peter Parker, so his death is a significant event for the Ultimate Comics Universe and we're going to see how quickly it changes everything," said Marvel Entertainment editor-in-chief Axel Alonso.
Writer Brian Michael Bendis told USA Today that he wrote the story "with tears in my eyes like a big baby".
"I went upstairs to my wife, and I go, 'I am so embarrassed. I think I've literally been crying for 45 minutes.' I've had real things happen in my life I didn't cry about, and yet I'm crying about this," said the author.
The story is issue number 160 of the Ultimate Spider-Man series, which debuted in 2000. "Ten years ago, Brian Bendis and Mark Millar changed the way people saw superheroes with the birth of the Ultimate Universe. With 'Death of Spider-Man' the two have done it again, creating a story just as big, and something that would really resonate with fans." said Marvel senior editor Mark Paniccia.
But, just as Holmes was resurrected by Conan Doyle following a public outcry, fans shouldn't abandon all hope for Spidey's future, with an all-new superhero set to don the famous red and blue webbed suit soon enough, according to Marvel.
The Case for Graphic Novels in Education
American Libraries Magazine makes one.
From the article...
Perhaps we’re past the point of having to explain that graphic novels, with their knack for attracting reluctant readers and hitting developmental sweet spots, have a legitimate place on library shelves. Perhaps. But what about the idea that graphic novels encompass such a wide range of themes and create such layered experiences through word and art that they actually belong in classrooms? Because contemporary students have a much wider visual vocabulary than we did growing up, I contend that the format offers great opportunities to teach as well as to entertain.
My own experiences as a teacher and a librarian bear out the medium’s potential. It will come as little surprise to anyone who works with children and young adults that graphic novels disappear from library shelves faster than anything else (except, maybe, vampire novels) and are the topic of eager discussion whenever they find their way into classrooms. This interest isn’t solely among kids looking for a fun, colorful story. Equally interested are the graduate students in my class at Pratt Institute, as well as many educators at LREI, the independent school in Manhattan where I work. Fascination with the history and language of the form as a vehicle for education is clear.
Peter Pan House to Become Center for Children's Literature?
That's the hope.
From a story on the BBC...
Author JM Barrie played in the grounds of the building as a child but the property has fallen into disrepair.
The Peter Pan Moat Brae Trust is currently raising funds for the upgrade of the building and has secured Joanna Lumley as a patron for its plans.
She said: "I am so thrilled and proud to be here to launch these exciting plans for the future of Moat Brae House and garden.
"There is such wonderful potential to create a fantastic National Centre for Children's Literature.
"I want to help raise the profile of this admirable project so that Peter Pan fans from all over the world can support this wonderful restoration."
The house and garden were in private ownership between 1823 and 1914.
It subsequently became a nursing home which shut in 1997 and fell into disrepair.
Wednesday, August 03, 2011
Write What You DON'T Know
That's the advice recently given in an essay in the Atlantic.
From the article...
I don’t know the origin of the “write what you know” logic. A lot of folks attribute it to Hemingway, but what I find is his having said this: “From all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive.” If this is the logic’s origin, then maybe what’s happened is akin to that old game called Telephone. In the game, one kid whispers a message to a second kid and then that kid whispers it to a third and so on, until the message circles the room and returns to the first kid. The message is always altered, minimized, and corrupted by translation. “Bill is smart to sit in the grass” becomes “Bill is a smart-ass.” A similar transmission problem undermines the logic of writing what you know and, ironically, Hemingway may have been arguing against it all along. The very act of committing an experience to the page is necessarily an act of reduction, and regardless of craft or skill, vision or voice, the result is a story beholden to and inevitably eclipsed by source material.
Another confession: part of me dies inside when a student whose story has been critiqued responds to the workshop by saying, “You can’t object to the _________ scene. It really happened! I was there!” The writer is giving preference to the facts of an experience, the so-called literal truth, rather than fiction’s narrative and emotional integrity. Conceived this way, the writer’s story is relegated to an inferior and insurmountable station; it can neither compete with, nor live without, the ur-experience. Such a writer’s sole ambition is for the characters and events to represent other and superior—read: actual—characters and events. Meaning, the written story has never been what mattered most. Meaning, the reader is meant to care less about the characters and more about whoever inspired them, and the actions in a story serve to ensure that we track their provenance and regard that material as truer. Meaning, the story is engineered—and expected—to be about something. And aboutness is all but terminal in fiction.
Stories aren’t about things. Stories are things.
Stories aren’t about actions. Stories are, unto themselves, actions.
The Bell Jar Turns 40
The Poetry Foundation looks back at Sylvia Plath's masterwork.
From the piece...
It’s always interesting when a very strange book is also an enduringly popular book. The Bell Jar has sold more than three million copies and is a mainstay of American high school English classes; it was made into a movie in 1979, and another version, starring Julia Stiles, is currently in production. Like The Catcher in the Rye, it is a touchstone for a certain kind of introspective, moody teenager—the kind of teenager who used to listen to the Cure and, later on, Tori Amos, and who these days listens to—actually I have no idea, but she definitely has a blog. (There are an amazing variety of embarrassing shrines to The Bell Jar online.) Unlike Catcher, it also has other sources of partisan support: feminists of the 1970s claimed Plath as a martyred patron saint of repressive domesticity, and mental illness advocates have found in her work easily identifiable symptoms and syndromes that were misdiagnosed and barbarically treated.
As much as it was initially underappreciated by the British press, The Bell Jar was overpraised on its American publication. As such, it has frustrated generations of critics and biographers by refusing to be quite the great novel you’d want a great poet’s only novel to be. The book’s appeal comes into focus only when a reader drops her outsized expectations; after that, a more complex story reveals itself. Under the pretense of describing mental breakdown and recovery, Plath was free to bare her stand-in narrator’s nastiest, most selfish impulses. In doing so, she both dramatized and exemplified the conflict inherent in trying to be both a great writer and a nice person.
Tuesday, August 02, 2011
How Young Adult Fiction Came of Age
The Atlantic highlights the rise of YA fiction.
From the article...
Meredith Barnes, a literary agent with Lowenstein Associates, demonstrates superhuman patience while explaining young adult literature to me. I am familiar enough with the basics: that YA is not to the written word as PG is to film. That it is publishing's closest thing to a safe bet in years. That it has seen explosive growth as a result. To wit: 3,000 young adult novels were published in 1997. Twelve years later, that figure hit 30,000 titles--an increase of a full order of magnitude. In 2009, total sales exceeded $3 billion, which is roughly all the money. (McSweeney's has the break down, and an astonishing array of statistics.)
While the purchasing power of young people has certainly increased over the years, such astounding figures and simple observation suggest that it's not just 12-year-olds smashing piggy banks on the counter at Powell's. Adults are buying and reading these books. When I was a teenager, young adults hadn't yet been invented and books aimed at my demographic were uniformly about babysitting. Blame 1 Corinthians 13:11, or the lack of Y to my A, but it no more occurred to me as an adult to browse the YA aisle than to catch a Jonas Brothers concert. The simple weirdness of men and women over the drinking age perusing the children's stacks before general fiction seemed cause for alarm and a fair argument for education reform.
Ms. Barnes offers reassurance that adult interest in YA is not the result of a crisis in the collective level of literacy in the United States. Rather, it's indicative of the quality and enduring themes addressed by young adult. "The fluid demographic barrier speaks to the emotional turmoil that makes contemporary young adult literature unique," she says. "Every decision feels life-changing, and every choice in these books can seem life-or-death. The emotions are no more or less valid than what one might experience at 30, but it's the first time, and thus very powerful."
How Oscar Wilde Painted Over Dorian Gray
Oscar Wilde's famous novel is discussed in the New Yorker.
From the piece...
Oscar Wilde was not a man who lived in fear, but early reviews of “The Picture of Dorian Gray” must have given him pause. The story, telling of a man who never ages while his portrait turns decrepit, appeared in the July, 1890, issue of Lippincott’s, a Philadelphia magazine with English distribution. The Daily Chronicle of London called the tale “unclean,” “poisonous,” and “heavy with the mephitic odours of moral and spiritual putrefaction.” The St. James Gazette deemed it “nasty” and “nauseous,” and suggested that the Treasury or the Vigilance Society might wish to prosecute the author. Most ominous was a short notice in the Scots Observer stating that although “Dorian Gray” was a work of literary quality, it dealt in “matters only fitted for the Criminal Investigation Department or a hearing in camera” and would be of interest mainly to “outlawed noblemen and perverted telegraph-boys”—an allusion to the recent Cleveland Street scandal, which had exposed the workings of a male brothel in London. Within five years, Wilde found himself convicted of “committing acts of gross indecency with certain male persons.”
The furor was unsurprising: no work of mainstream English-language fiction had come so close to spelling out homosexual desire. The opening pages leave little doubt that Basil Hallward, the painter of Dorian’s portrait, is in love with his subject. Once Dorian discovers his godlike powers, he carries out various heinous acts, including murder; but to the Victorian sensibility his most unspeakable deed would have been his corruption of a series of young men. (Basil tells Dorian, “There was that wretched boy in the Guards who committed suicide. You were his great friend. There was Sir Henry Ashton, who had to leave England, with a tarnished name. You and he were inseparable.”) At the Wilde trials of 1895, the opposing attorneys read aloud from “Dorian Gray,” calling it a “sodomitical book.” Wilde went to prison not because he loved young men but because he flaunted that love, and “Dorian Gray” became the chief exhibit of his shamelessness.
DC Comics and Women Hires
After being called out for not hiring women or developing women characters, DC Comics says it'll do something about it.
From a piece in the Guardian...
"The petition includes over 100 suggestions for female comic creators DC could approach, and the list continues to grow as signers leave additional recommendations in the comments," she added.
DiDio and his fellow co-publisher, Jim Lee, have now responded, saying in a statement to fans that "we want you to know, first and foremost, that we hear you and take your concerns very seriously", and pointing to writers including Gail Simone, Amy Reeder Hadley, Felicia D Henderson, Fiona Staples, Amanda Conner, G Willow Wilson and Nicola Scott, to "remarkable, iconic" DC women characters such as Wonder Woman, Lois Lane, Batgirl, Batwoman, Catwoman and Supergirl, "as well as fan favourite characters like Black Canary, Katana, Mera and Starfire".
"We're committed to telling diverse stories with a diverse point of view," they said. "We want these adventures to resonate in the real world, reflecting the experiences of our diverse readership. Can we improve on that? We always can – and aim to." DiDio and Lee promised "exciting news about new projects with women creators in the coming months", adding that "we know there are dozens of other women creators and we welcome the opportunity to work with them".
Five Best E-Readers
Lifehacker breaks 'em down.
From the piece...
Amazon Kindle
Amazon's Kindle is probably the most ubiquitous ereader on the market today. The Kindle comes in a standard 6-inch model and the larger 9-inch Kindle DX, priced at $114 for the ad-supported 6-inch model, $139 for the Wi-Fi only version, $189 for the 3G 6-inch model, $139 for the ad-supported 3G model, and $379 for the 3G Kindle DX. The Kindle features a high-contrast E-ink display, is capable of storing over 3,500 books from the Kindle store, and if you spring for the 3G models you can download books anywhere, or surf the web using the built-in browser.
Everett Ruess - Vanished Writer
Honestly, a writer who vanished, never to be heard from again. What happened to him?
From a piece on NPR...
Everett Ruess could have been one of this country's greatest wilderness writers, a poet and author on a par with John Muir or Edward Abbey.
But we'll never know for sure, because Ruess disappeared without a trace in November 1934. With two burros trailing behind him, he left the remote southern Utah town of Escalante, heading down the desolate Hole-in-the-Rock Trail towards the Colorado River in search of his favorite things: beauty and solitude.
About a week down the trail, Ruess ran into two sheepherders and camped with them for a couple of nights.
And then, author David Roberts tells weekends on All Things Considered host Guy Raz, Ruess rode off into a nearby canyon and vanished from the face of the Earth.
Roberts is the author of the new book Finding Everett Ruess: The Life and Unsolved Disappearance of a Legendary Wilderness Explorer.
Monday, August 01, 2011
Agatha Christie - Surfer
Indeed!
From a piece in the Guardian...
Hercule Poirot never risked his little grey cells – nor his impeccably waxed moustache – by attempting to hang ten. Nor did Jane Marple ever strap a board to the roof of a Kombi and thunder out of St Mary Mead in search of the perfect tube.
Their enigmatic creator, though, was something of a pioneering and diehard wave-rider. At a time when many of her contemporaries were chugging cocktails in Blighty, Agatha Christie was paddling out from beaches in Cape Town and Honolulu to earn her surfing stripes.
Research by Pete Robinson, founder of the Devon-based Museum of British Surfing, suggests Christie and her first husband, Archie, may been among the first Britons to learn how to surf standing up.
The Rise of Self-Publishing
The New York Times highlights the fact that many authors are no longer getting published in traditional means and there's no longer a stigma for self-publication.
From the piece...
Self-publishing is obviously taking off, but statistics on new titles are almost impossible to come by because so many books counted as part of “nontraditional” publishing include reprints of old books now in the public domain.
But Mr. Weiss said his company was on track to publish 26,000 new books this year, compared with 13,000 four years ago. CreateSpace, the self-publishing arm of Amazon.com, doesn’t release numbers, but a spokeswoman, Brittany Turner, told me in an e-mail that its books increased by 80 percent from 2009 to 2010.
There are many reasons potential authors want to publish their own books, Mr. Weiss said. They have an idea or manuscript they have passed around to various agents and publishers with no luck; they may just want to print a few copies of, say, a memoir for family members; they want to use it in their business as a type of calling card; or they actually want to sell a lot of books and make their living as writers.
“You have to know what services you’re buying, who retains the rights, and realize that getting a book published is not the same as getting it marketed,” Ms. Shanley said. “One size doesn’t fit all.”
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